The first day of April often sneaks up on us. It isn't until you sit on a whoopee cushion that you realize it is, indeed, April Fools' Day. But whoopee cushions and ketchup-covered "severed fingers" are pranks of the past. Over the last decade, the Web has become an increasingly popular place to play April Fools' Day pranks, tricks, and hoaxes.

Though there have not been any War of the Worlds-type freakouts from these Web jokes, it's often easy to be fooled. Companies like Google, YouTube, Hulu, and Funny or Die are known for their yearly April Fools' Day tricks. ThinkGeek posts products—a Tauntaun sleeping bag or the iCade, an arcade for your iPad—that leave us wanting them for days after. Sometimes, the joke's on them as many of the products have received so much interest that they're actually produced and made available to buy. Even non-tech companies like Whole Foods and Starbucks have punked the Internet. (We were taken in by venti-delivering baristas on scooters.) But Google is the king of April Fools' Day hoaxes, providing more than a solid decade of Aprils with gesture-based Gmail, name changes (to Topeka, no less), and a lunar research center.

We've picked out nine companies that have either done a very good job at pulling the wool over our eyes or have presented their April Fools' Day jokes in a hilarious way. Did you or a co-worker pull a side-splitting stunt at your company this year? Please share your antic in the comments section below.

1Google

Google has a long history of pulling April Fools' Day hoaxes. Starting as far back as 2000 with MentalPlex, which convinced users to project a mental image of what they wanted to search for as they stared into an animated GIF, Google has brought us many a practical joke. And some—like 2004's job ad for the Google Copernicus Center, a research center on the moon, and 2005's Google Gulp, a fake beverage that was said to optimize your use of Google's search engine by raising your intelligence—are less believable than others.

In the past four years, Google started making its hoaxes more and more elaborate. In 2008, Google launched 14 hoaxes, including Gmail Custom Time, a feature that allowed users to "pre-date" their messages; Virgile, a human settlement on Mars via a partnership with Richard Branson's Virgin; and the start of the Rickrolling meme. In 2010, Google "changed" its name to Topeka to honor the "moving gesture" that the city of Topeka, Kansas showed by temporarily changing its name to Google. Last year's big April Fools' Day joke from Google was Gmail Motion, a body-gesture-based way to send and read Gmail. Gmail Motion used the user's built-in webcam and Google's patented spatial-tracking technology to detect movement and translate them into characters and commands.

2YouTube

YouTube celebrated its "100th birthday" last year by adding a classic "1911" button on every video. Pressing it added a grainy yellow skin and an early 20th century piano score to the video. The promo prank video featured old-timey versions of some of YouTube's most viral videos, including the infamous Rickroll, Annoying Orange, Bedroom Intruder, and Keyboard Cat (called "Flugelhorn Feline" back in 1911).

The year before, YouTube "launched" TEXTp. Twenty-four hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube is great, but that also means rising bandwidth costs. To keep expenses down, YouTube brought us a text-only mode, replacing the images in videos with a series of letters and numbers, similar to ASCII art, so that it was less taxing on YouTube's system, while also having the "added benefit of promoting literacy."

3Hulu

In 2011, Hulu traveled back in time to 1996 when grainy photos, website counters, and site guest books were the coolest things ever. Viewers who visited the Hulu homepage were greeted by a Geocities-esque layout and episodes of "News Radio," "Sliders," and "The X-Files." Hulu joined in the Fools' Day fun in 2010 with its secret "Training and Orientation" video. Users visiting Hulu were offered the option to view a video in 3D. When they clicked the 3D button, they saw a 10-minute video detailing Hulu's familiar alien plot to turn our brains into mush by making us watch too much TV.

4Funny or Die

Viral video site Funny or Die always makes us laugh, but particularly on April Fools' Day. In 2010, the site was redesigned around teen pop sensation Justin Bieber, who bought the site as a tribute to himself and the highly contagious "Bieber fever." Renamed Bieber or Die, the site featured spoofs of viral video faves such as "Bieber After the Dentist" and "Dramatic Bieber." Last year, the site turned into Friday or Die, a cheesier version of what it did the year before, but this time parodying auto-tuned pop star Rebecca Black.

5LinkedIn

In 2011, LinkedIn users found the "People You May Know" contact recommendation engine had added a few unusual characters. Although we'd love to link in with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, it was just too good to be true. The duo, along with Groucho Marx, Albert Einstein, Robin Hood, and J.R.R. Tolkien were all gone the following day.

6Reddit

For one day only on April 1, 2010, Reddit users became administrators and were able to edit headlines, ban users by clicking on the "A" next to their names, and vote up stories as many times as they pleased. Not surprisingly, the day resulted in complete chaos. The following year, Reddit infected its users with mold. If a Reddit user signed you up for Reddit Mold, you'd see 10 fewer comments. You also wouldn't be able to use the letter "E." Every time someone gave you mold, Reddit took away another letter of the alphabet, leaving you eventually with the letters "M," "P," and "H," (just enough for you to yell "MMMPHHH!"). By the end of the day, 270,845 people had received a total of 282,743 mold spores.

7Kodak

Known for dipping its toes into the April Fools' pool, Kodak graced us last year with Relationshiffft, a feature that removed our exes from our photos. In 2010, Kodak introduced us to Aromatography, new imaging sensors and software developed by Kodak that made it possible to view and smell photos, thanks to breakthroughs in Neuro-Optic-Nasal-Sense. In 2009, Kodak introduced the eyeCamera 4.1, a wearable cyborg-esque social-media-compatible camera that lets you stream your life 24/7.

8Starbucks

Online pranks aren't confined just to tech companies. Starbucks introduced Mobile Pour last year, an app that sends a scooter-riding barista to deliver your drink. The year before, Starbucks announced on its site that it was introducing two new beverage sizes: Plenta (128 fluid ounces) and Micra (2 fluid ounces).

9Whole Foods

Last year, Whole Foods blanketed its site with multiple announcements, including its partnership with farmers and ranchers in an "Insects Raised with Compassion" campaign; its trio of artisan cheese lip balms; and the ability to set up a direct deposit account to have your entire paycheck automatically converted to a Whole Foods gift card.